Taylorville native, basketball coach Johnny Orr dies

Tuesday

Dec 31, 2013 at 10:00 AMDec 31, 2013 at 11:21 PM

Staff and Wire Reports

Before Johnny Orr achieved national fame as the fist-pumping basketball coach who led Michigan to the NCAA title game and Iowa State to Division I prominence, he was already beloved in his hometown of Taylorville.

Orr, whose death at age 86 was confirmed Tuesday by Iowa State, was just as well known in central Illinois as a star on coach Dolph Stanley’s legendary 1943-44 Taylorville High School basketball team that went 45-0 and won the state championship.

“A lot of people believed we couldn’t go undefeated,” Orr said in a 1994 interview with The State Journal-Register’s Dave Kane. “But everyone here (at Taylorville) was really supportive. We always had great crowds.”

Multi-sport star

Orr was also a Taylorville standout in baseball, football and track, and he was a basketball player and three-sport athlete as a freshman at the University of Illinois before enlisting in the Navy near the end of World War II. After the war, he played basketball again for Stanley, who was coaching at Beloit (Wis.) College, and later played briefly in the NBA with the St. Louis Bombers and the Waterloo Hawks.

But he’ll always be known in Taylorville as a member of the Tornadoes team that became the first undefeated state basketball champion in Illinois history. Orr was named one of the 100 legends of the Illinois High School Association boys basketball tournament in 2007, and his No. 43 was retired by Taylorville High School at the same time as teammate Ron Bontemps’ No. 34.

In Taylor Bell’s book “Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: High School Basketball in Illinois,” Orr said, “Years later, I look back and realize we were the first unbeaten state champion. How the hell did we ever do it? You don’t realize it until much later, what a helluva thing it was.”

National success

Orr went on to spend 29 seasons as a Division I coach. Twelve were at Michigan, where he guided the Wolverines to four NCAA tournament berths, the national title game in 1976 (Michigan lost 86-68 to Indiana) and 209 wins, the most in the school history.

Orr then led Iowa State to a school-record 218 wins from 1980 until 1994.

Orr started his major-college head coaching career with three seasons at Massachusetts. The energetic and charismatic coach finished with a career record of 466-346 and 10 NCAA tournament appearances.

“He was my hero,” said Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg, who grew up in Ames, Iowa, and played for three years under Orr.

Orr left UMass for Michigan and spent one season as an assistant before taking over as head coach in 1968.

Orr was twice named the Big Ten’s coach of the year. In 1976, Orr was honored by the National Association of Basketball Coaches as its national coach of the year, and the Wolverines won the league title the following season.

“The Michigan Basketball program is saddened by the passing of Johnny Orr today,” Michigan coach John Beilein said. “Johnny was a tremendous person and basketball coach. We will always value the many positives he brought to both the University of Michigan and college basketball in general.”

Orr made the jump to Iowa State, then a struggling program, before the 1980-81 season and guided the program to its first NCAA tournament berth in 41 years in 1985.

A year later, Orr led the Cyclones in the Sweet Sixteen by beating Michigan. Iowa State would go on to reach the NCAA tournament four more times under Orr, whose up-tempo style and outgoing personality is viewed as the catalyst for the program’s fervent following.

Orr would enter Hilton Coliseum to the “Tonight Show” theme and a trademark fist pump, helping cultivate a tremendous home-court advantage for the Cyclones. Iowa State beat 20 ranked opponents at home under Orr, who was honored with a statue inside the arena in 2011.

Orr coached 18 players who went on to the NBA, including Hoiberg and Phoenix Suns coach Jeff Hornacek.

“As a kid, just to see him walk out of that tunnel was what you waited for on game nights. Just to see his enthusiasm and passion. He was a father figure to so many of us. He impacted so many lives and made all of us better people. Not only was he a great basketball coach, he was even a better person,” Hoiberg said.

Orr is survived by his wife, Romie, and daughters Jennifer, Leslie and Rebecca.